SQL Buddy is one of my all time favorite tool, that I’ve use daily for accessing and managing MySQL administration of servers. SQL Buddy is an open source web based tool was written in PHP language that intended to manage SQLite and MySQL administration via web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE+ (Internet Explorer).

SQL Buddy is an simple, lightweight and super fast application that offers a well-designed interface with a comprehensive feature set for database administrators and programmers. The tool allows you to add, edit, modify and dropdatabases and tables, import and exportdatabases, indexes, foreign key relationships, run SQL queries and so on.

Install SQL Buddy

It is an good alternative to phpMyAdmin with fast and attractive Ajax based web interface with support for 47 different languages and themes. Compared to phpMyAdmin, SQL Buddy has almost all features set of phpMyAdmin but SQL Buddy is very light weight in size 320kb (i.e 1.1MB) after extracting and very easy to setup no installation requires, just unzip the files under web-server root directory and log in with your database username and password.

SQL Buddy also offers some useful keyboard shortcuts like create, edit, delete, refresh, select all and query, so you can manage the tool without the use of mouse. If you deal with large number of MySQL databases, then SQL Buddy is your all time choice.

Installing SQL Buddy in RHEL / CentOS / Fedora

To use SQL Buddy, first Download SQL Buddy and unzip the files in a folder and then upload the folder to your web-server root directory via ftp. For example, (/var/www/html/sqlbuddy) in my case, but it shouldn’t matter where you place them or what you name the folder.

If you don’t want to download, unzip and upload etc, then simply use the following rpm build developed by Erik Jacobs. Simply run the following commands to install SQL Buddy.

Next, navigate to the web browser and type the following command to launch the SQL Buddy.

http://yourserver.com/sqlbuddy or http://youripaddress/sqlbuddy

Select MySQL and enter your username and password.

SQL Buddy Login Screen

Welcome screen of SQL Buddy.

SQL Buddy Welcome Screen

These are some useful SQL Buddy keyboard shortcuts are available.

SQL Buddy Keyboard Shortcuts

If you want to customize your installation, then there are few useful variables in config.php that you may interested. If you’ve installed SQL Buddy using rpm package, then the file is located at.

# vi /usr/share/sqlbuddy/config.php

If you want to restrict SQL Buddy to specific IP address, then open the file with VI editor.

# vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/sqlbuddy.conf

Add the following lines of code to sqlbuddy.conf file. Replace your-ip-address with your server. This is for rpm based installation, if you’ve used zip format installation, then place the actual path of folder.

Take a look on free tool Valentina Studio, is the best way to transform your data into meaningful information; create, administer, query and explore Valentina DB, MySQL, Postgre and SQLite databases for free on 32/64 bit Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. http://www.valentina-db.com/en/valentina-studio-overview

If you are a beginner to MySQL administration and don’t need multiple functions phpmyadmin – http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php will be enough for you. I used phpmyadmin when I needed simple to import or export MySQL database to/from my sites on wordpress. But if you want to jump to a new level of MySQL management and administration, have lots of features and really comfortable and intuitive graphical user intarface, then I’ll recommend you to try Devart’s dbForge Studio for MySQL – http://www.devart.com/dbforge/mysql/studio/ . I started to use it long ago and its suits all me needs. With version 6.0 it improved the functional significantly!